A rare behind-the-scenes look at artist/activists who took on the AIDS crisis, police brutality, and art-world elitism.
Fighting for justice with paintbrush and pizzazz.
Invoking Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, O’Neill-Butler explores the subversive, surprising, and often brilliant tactics of artists fighting for social change. Ten case studies spanning five decades illustrate the original ways artists have demonstrated against unjust practices, “from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat.” O’Neill-Butler, a former editor of Artforum, shares her intimate knowledge of these movements and draws on conversations with activists, including the painter Faith Ringgold, the art critic Lucy Lippard, and the photographer Nan Goldin. Their protests transformed museums: In the 1960s, the Art Workers Coalition forced the Museum of Modern Art to allow free admission, to include more artists of color, and to take a moral stance against the Vietnam War by juxtaposing photos of the My Lai massacre with Picasso’s Guernica. The Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee shamed the Whitney Museum to include more work by women by issuing a forged press release on museum letterhead announcing that half the artists in a touted exhibition would be women. Goldin, who had become addicted to OxyContin, organized PAIN to demand that museums end “artwashing” by the billionaire Sackler family, creators of the drug, by removing their name from galleries and rejecting their donations. These artists changed not only the art world but broader society. Benny Andrews of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition brought drawing classes to men incarcerated in the so-called Tombs, a program that eventually spread to jails and prisons throughout the country. Edgar Heap of Birds, known for his innovative monoprints, endowed galleries to showcase Native American art. Painter Rick Lowe restored dilapidated shotgun shacks in Houston to create low-income housing and community cultural spaces. For a volume about art and artists, the book contains too few visuals, but O’Neill-Butler’s vivid writing makes up for that shortcoming.
A rare behind-the-scenes look at artist/activists who took on the AIDS crisis, police brutality, and art-world elitism.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781804296332
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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